Nuremberg and the Birth of International Criminal Law

The Second World War (1939-1945) shattered whatever remained of the interwar legal order that the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the Permanent Court of International Justice had sought to build. Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, following the annexation of Austria in 1938 and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, proceeded in open disregard of the territorial guarantees and dispute-resolution procedures the interwar system had established, and the war's subsequent expansion into a truly global conflict, involving unrestricted submarine warfare, the strategic bombing of civilian population centers, and ultimately the deliberate, industrialized genocide of European Jews and other groups by Nazi Germany, exposed the near-total collapse of the legal restraints that Hague and Geneva law had attempted to place on the conduct of war.